SAT-04 Microscope

[gammaraygames]

I was only able to attend for 2 sessions and I had a very short wishlist for both, I wanted to play either Fiasco or Dread on Friday and either Shock or Microscope on Saturday. Thanks to the generosity and intentionality of my friends and event hosts, I was able to both. On Friday, Johnzo got me into a great game of Fiasco (go Rooster Man!) and on SAT 04, Ben Robbins melted my brain w/ the sheer awesomeness that is Microscope.

And by awesomeness, I don't mean in an 80s TV Show kind of way, I mean in a, "My God. It's full of stars," kind of way. I don't know what sort of cutesy nickname is going to be applied to die hard fans of this game (Scopies, maybe?) but when I find out, I'm going to print it on a shirt so that I can talk about the game with complete strangers who will suddenly find themselves seriously questioning their choice to have ever asked me about it.

[Ben Robbins]

Good times! I really liked how we started with a fairly neutral "galactic empire", but then the nanosecond Godhead and the power-map of Core Empire emerged as central concepts. Boom: unique universe.

I was actually surprised (in a good way) that bittersweet won the vote over bitter by a landslide. Everybody embracing the "dying omniscient academic not wanting to tell his wife that he could foresee that she would get over his death and be happy again, because he knew how much knowing that about herself would hurt her" -- something that had no real impact on the history per se -- was a really nice human moment.

Eric, Kynnin and Gilbert: you guys rocked.

[gapb]

Thank you everyone. I'm glad I was able to contribute, because you all made Microscope the high point of my weekend. It was really cool being able to throw an idea out there and watch the rest of the group make something out of it better than I would have done on my own. I'm looking forward to someday in the not too distant future playing it with some of my other friends and seeing what they come up with.

[kscott]

This was a great game of Microscope. I've played several sessions before, but we'd never done the standard galactic empire thing. It's fun to have such a wide sandbox to play in!

The Godhead was great. That was a good example of negotiation really making the Palette into something everyone found compelling. I like the idea of post-Singularity consciousnesses, but I can imagine a game of Microscope really going off the rails if it actually contained a Singularity in the history. Getting those consciousnesses without precipitating a singularity resulted in some very neat toys.

Playing the doomed academic was great. When the scene resolution came down and it turned out that he was distracted from his purpose by this realisation about his wife, and then died without ever speaking the answer he took the Godhead for? That was deliciously painful to experience in his shoes.

Thanks for making such a great game everyone. In retrospect the only thing I might have done differently would be to run with the misunderstanding of my "bagman" character—but then, who knows how that history would have unfolded?

And especial thanks to Ben for caving when I asked if he would run another session of Microscope!

[Ben Robbins]

Posted a bit about all the great Microscope games at GPNW:

Expect the Unexpected: Microscope at GPNW 2010